Over on Story Games, some folks helped me do some brainstorming to compile a list of Player Skills. Much like GM Tasks, these are things that players are commonly asked to do in different games. Also like GM Tasks, though, players are not always expected to always do the same things the same ways in the same proportions. So while they have wide applicability, no skill is universal to all games, and no one means of exercising a skill is universal to all games.

Here's the list:

Acting / Immersion Skills

Bring issues you really care about to the character in ways you can deal with

Connect emotionally with your character

Keep the character true to its core concept

Know when and how to be meaningfully still and silent

Speak in Character

Think in Character -- modeling other minds (e.g. both what are my fellow players thinking, and what are these fictional people thinking, in order to predict behaviour; this may be particularly relevant to playing with young kids when this ability is still emerging)

Screw the other players over in amusing ways (which sounds odd, but it's essential in Paranoia)

Share your goals (selling)

Share others' goals (buy-in)

Step out of the spotlight if there's no reason for you to be in it.

Theme - Identifying and Understanding it

Theme - Participating in it

Theme - Contributing to it

Accept character development in unexpected directions

Reasoning Skills

Abductive Reasoning

Deductive Reasoning

Inductive Reasoning

Use different Reasonings together

Game Skills

Buy Character Abilities (Traits, Powers, Stats, Whatever)

Separate players from characters (both own and other players) after the game.

Set Difficulty Levels

Spend Character Resources Strategically

Spend XP and have a sense of future XP Spends

However, now that I've got this very handy list, I'm not sure what to do with it. Because each skill is used in a different way in almost every game out there, it's difficult to impossible to talk about any of these skills in isolation, and I'm not sure there's much use in that to begin with. I fear the list is too long to be very useful as a design tool (The Player Skills 64!), and I'm not sure what you'd do with it if you used it in that way. This might be useful fodder for designing drills, but even then how a custom-created drill teaches a skill might differ greatly from how another game might use it.

So right now I'm going to archive this bad boy, put it away for a bit and maybe come back to it later. Additionally, if anybody's got some bright ideas of how this might be useful, I'd be happy to hear them!

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I dropped my comments into your follow-up thread on SG, but expanded here: I would find a group of between three and five people who play significantly differently, then I would get each of them to write a short piece on each skill (even if they don't think that the skill is useful, they can just say that). I bet that would be a pretty dang compilation to read.

In other news: I don't know if you knew this, but your comments feed acts all funky for me. As far as I can tell, it only gets updated when the primary feed gets updated. This has two detrimental effects: 1) it means that it's not as easy as it could be to follow discussion on the blog and 2) since the feed is only 10 comments long, some people who read just through an aggregator are going to miss stuff if there's enough discussion between main posts. I was going to email you, but I couldn't find an email address for you anywhere...

I suppose it could be useful as a diagnostic, although I'd think you'd have to simplify it down a bit -- having everybody write 64 paragraphs and then collating them all seems like a huge headache. An interesting proposition, though: instead of the report card assessment, a sort of group interpretation and preference. Hm.

I have no idea what I've done to screw up my feeds. One of these days, when I have a free weekend (hah!) I'll backup my stylesheets and re-install to see if that beats them into submission.

[...] In fact, I see three angles on this issue (so far): Joshua’s original list, which is heavy on RPG theory; Don’s rant, which puts fun over theory; and yesterday’s TT post on player skills, which is somewhere in the middle. That’s fertile ground for discussion! [...]